THE CARTOON OF PISA
FROM THE MONOCHROME AT HOLKHAM HALL
(By permission of the Earl of Leicester)
In August 1504, Michael Angelo was commissioned to prepare cartoons for the decoration of a wall in the Sala del Gran Consiglio in the Palazzo Vecchio, opposite the wall for which Leonardo da Vinci was already preparing designs. Michael Angelo had a workshop given him in the Hospital of the Dyers at San Onofrio, under the date October 31, 1504; a minute of expenditure shows that paper for the cartoon was provided. Leonardo's design was the famous "Fight for the Standard." Michael Angelo chose an episode from the war with Pisa, when, on July 28, 1364, a band of four hundred Florentines were surprised bathing in the Arno by Sir John Hawkwood (Giovanni Acuto) and his cavalry, then in the service of the Pisans, a subject that enabled Michael Angelo to express his delight in the beauty of the human form, and his power of drawing and foreshortening the naked limbs of the bathers as they hurry out of the river and don their armour at the sound of the alarm. This great central work of Michael Angelo's prime has disappeared, and we must be very careful in studying it to allow for the weakness of the work of the copyists and engravers who preserved what little record of it is left for us, especially in the drawing of the nude. If we compare the vault of the Sistine Chapel with the contemporary [pg 125]engravings we shall be able to estimate the enormous difference between the cartoon, which may have been the greatest work of art produced in Italy, and the copies of it that exist. The most complete copy of the cartoon is the monochrome painting belonging to the Earl of Leicester, at Holkham Hall. There is a sketch of the whole composition in the Albertina Gallery at Vienna, and the line engraving by Marc Antonio Raimondi of three principal figures with a foolish Italian rendering of a German engraved landscape in the background, utterly destroying what little Michael Angelesque dignity the engraver was able to get into the figures, with his poor knowledge of the nude. The best remnants we have are some few of Michael Angelo's own studies from the nude, done especially for this composition; they are full of the power, vigour, and naturalism peculiar to this period, rude forms hacked out of the paper with a broad pen, altered with charcoal, chalk, white paint, or anything handy and effective; from them we must try and imagine the power, breadth and dignity of the great composition. The work was done upon ordinary paper, stretched over canvas or linen fixed on a wooden frame, like the few cartoons by the great masters that have come down to us. The outlines were usually pricked, and when finished the cartoon was cut into convenient sizes for pouncing on the wall or other foundation upon which the picture was to be painted, unless the artist took the precaution of putting a plain piece of paper under the original drawing and pricking both together and transferring the outlines by the aid of the second sheet. These cut-up cartoons became the property of the whole workshop, and were used by the pupils when they wished. No doubt the roughness of [pg 126]this treatment soon destroyed many of them. Vasari, who cannot have seen the Cartoon of Pisa, gives us a long, enthusiastic description of it, ending with some helpful notes as to the materials with which it was drawn, and an account of its effect upon contemporary artists. He continues: "In addition, you discovered groups of figures sketched in various methods, some outlined with charcoal, some shaded with lines, some rubbed in, some heightened with white-lead, the master having sought to prove his empire over all materials of draughtsmanship.[84] The craftsmen of design remained therewith astonished and dumbfounded, recognising the fullest reaches of their art revealed to them by this unrivalled masterpiece. Those who examined the forms I have described, painters who inspected and compared them with works hardly less divine, affirm that never in the history of human achievement was any product of man's brain seen like to them in mere supremacy. And certainly we have the right to believe this; for when the cartoon was finished and carried to the hall of the Pope, amid the acclamation of all artists and to the exceeding fame of Michael Angelo, the students who made drawings from it, as happened with foreigners and natives through many years in Florence, became men of mark in several branches. This is obvious, for Aristotele da San Gallo worked there, as did Ridolfo Grillandaio, Rafael Santio da Urbino, Francesco Granaccio, Baccio Bandinelli, and Alonso [pg 127]Berugetta, the Spaniard; they were followed by Andrea del Sarto, il Franciabigio, Jacomo Sansovino, il Rosso, Maturino, Lorenzetto, Tribolo (then a boy), Jacomo da Puntormo, and Pierin del Vaga, all of them first-rate masters of the Florentine school."
Benvenuto Cellini's account is important, for he himself copied the cartoon in 1513 just before it disappeared. He says: "Michael Angelo portrayed a number of foot soldiers, who, the season being summer, had gone to bathe in the Arno. He drew them at the moment the alarm is sounded, and the men, all naked, rush to arms. So splendid is their action, that nothing survives of ancient or of modern art which touches the same lofty point of excellence; and, as I have already said, the design of the great Leonardo was itself most admirably beautiful. These two cartoons stood, one in the Palace of the Medici, the other in the hall of the Pope. So long as they remained intact they were the school of the world. Though the divine Michael Angelo in later life finished that great chapel of Pope Julius, he never rose half-way to the same pitch of power; his genius never afterwards attained to the force of those first studies."
These years spent under the shadow of the Duomo, away from which no Florentine is happy, working at his sculptures and drawings, were probably some of the happiest years of Michael Angelo's whole life.